70 billion dollars of bonuses for Wall Street: Your Bailout Dollars at Work

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned..

..In the first nine months of the year Citigroup, which employs thousands of staff in the UK, accrued $25.9bn for salaries and bonuses, an increase on the previous year of 4%. Earlier this week the bank accepted a $25bn investment by the US government as part of its bail-out plan.

At Goldman Sachs the figure was $11.4bn, Morgan Stanley $10.73bn, JP Morgan $6.53bn and Merrill Lynch $11.7bn. At Merrill, which was on the point of going bust last month before being taken over by Bank of America, the total accrued in the last quarter grew 76% to $3.49bn.

What’s worse is this: all profits for Wall Street for the 3 prior years have now been wiped out by this years losses. So, in other words, the people being paid bonuses haven’t actually made any money for their companies for going on four years now.

Companies I’ve worked for you don’t get bonuses for that, you get fired.

But I’m sure you’re glad that Congresss, the Treasury and the Fed are all working overtime to make sure that bankers continue to be paid as they’ve become accustomed to.

Ian Welsh

Ian Welsh was the Managing Editor of FireDogLake and the Agonist. His work has also appeared at Huffington Post, Alternet, and Truthout, as well as the now defunct Blogging of the President (BOPNews). In Canada his work has appeared in Pogge.ca and BlogsCanada. He is also a social media strategy consultant and currently lives in Toronto.